Wow. Looks like Twitter is having the biggest downtime to date. After a day of it crawling at very low speeds, refreshing on the other machine, it’s now firing in circles. Meaning that a hit to my Twitter seems to be constantly redirecting to itself. Odd. And painful (for the server)!
update: Now it’s “Twitter: down for maintenance—be back shortly!”
I think that the users out there with hundreds (some well over a thousand Friends) (Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis, for example) are probably causing a huge strain on the databases while calling for updates, depending on their architecture.
It could also be that they are in the process of implementing a group feature. Which should enable a further filter to reduce heavy flow. I’m sure they’ll get it all fixed up soon.
It also means that as it’s down people can get back to blogging! Ha!
It’s a shame that this went down, as I did a quick favour for my friend Bre Pettis from Make: magazine and set up a simple PHP script to grab the latest updates from the Make:Craft: and Hacks: zine blogs and post them to their respective Twitter accounts, which Bre set up after I alerted him that those usernames were still available.
Finally, Adobe’s Apollo is out for developers to try out their Flash, Flex and AJAX Ninjutsu and build cross-platform desktop apps. Mike Chambers, who runs the excellent Developer Network there (and did at Macromedia before) introduces it nicely.
Previously, I have used a product called Zinc to build desktop apps from Flash, but now a lot of this functionality is in the box with Apollo and has has HUGE potential for a amazingly simple and useful applications being built very quickly. The reason I use Zinc is for the FileSystem and FileI/O functionality, meaning I can read and write files on the local hard disk like a ‘real’ application with proper Setup installs for PC and Mac. With that and the ability to download and upload files, as well as run other processes and languages, it’s pretty useful.
I will be having a go at building some Apollo apps (with their .air extension), when I get the time (how could I not!). To give you some ideas, this is what I would do (and no doubt many others will do) in order:
- An RSS/XML reader
- A Twitter app
- A podcatcher
- A podcast publisher (a la podbat)
- A basic OPML Editor
- Podcast directory widgets
- Web publishing system
- Go to the moon
It should be relatively easy for anyone with existing AJAX, Flash and Flex skills to build any of these now. (OK. Bar one )
Read on to these great resources and the documentation for more info on Adobe Apollo. The desktop just melded that little bit further towards the web. All due to existing skillsets
This is also hitting the blogsphere :
Mike Arrington says “Go build something!” I agree with him when he says that “entirely new classes of companies can be built on this platform, which takes Flash, HTML and javascript completely outside of the browser and interacts with the file system on a PC”.
Scoble says the downside is it needs to be online. Not so, dear Robert. People could write apps which have data persistence, storing stuff locally, which could then be synced on connection
